Haber was a chemist and he was paid for being a chemist. However, you make it sound like he’s merely some lackey to a corporation. Haber was a professor at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and had his own lab. Like many professors with their own labs, they pick out what they want to work on.
The nitrogen problem was the major problem of its day. Germany had a fast growing population. It was the largest country by population in Europe except for Russia. There was a concern that Germany couldn’t grow enough food to feed its people, and that the supply of nitrogen rich minerals were remote.
Germany was also a fairly new country and was quickly finding itself surrounded by potential enemies (Going to war with France in 1886 wasn’t exactly building a good neighbor policy). The British were concerned with the growing power of the German navy, and Germany worried that a war with Britain could cut off its supply of nitrogen rich minerals.
Haber worked on the problem because he was an extremely patriotic German. He was a devoted chemist whose theoretical work is still important today. His text book was used throughout the world. I don’t know if Haber was a prick. But, he had great relationships with his fellow chemists.
Haber’s patriotism lead him to working on chemical warfare in World War I. Haber personally oversaw the gassing of troops on the Western Front. Haber wasn’t the only chemist involved. Future Nobel laureates James Franck, Gustav Hertz, and Otto Hahn worked with Haber in chemical warfare. Nor, was Germany the only country involved in chemical warfare. French Nobel laureate Victor Grignard was also working on chemical weapons in World War I.
Despite his involvement in WWI, Haber later won the Royal Society’s Rumford Metal in 1932 for his work in Physical Chemistry.
Any updates on the numbers in the last paragraph of Cecil’s 1997 report?
…Although organic produce accounts for only 2 percent of crops in the U.S., increasing sales in this category send a powerful signal to the agriculture industry… Some surveys say half of all farmers now use IPM techniques to some degree, and the U.S. goal is 75 percent by the year 2000…
I always love how anti-GMO people seem to always think that the accidental horizontal gene transfer enacted by the Aztecs is somehow more “natural” and safer than the purposeful horizontal gene transfer that modern-day people who know what the crap they’re doing do today.
And it’s not like today’s food scientists are just randomly splicing in proteins with reckless abandon and just hoping for the best. There’s actually, you know, science involved.
I have mixed feelings about things like terminator genes (although at least those are self-correcting if they somehow transfer into wild species) but when it comes to giving plants more natural resistance against insects and drought and disease? Hell yeah!
So the argument here is that because most GMO food we’ve been eating for the last few years is safe, that no corporation might, in the future, develop something that causes adverse effects in any part of the populace?
I make no argument that most GMO food has been eaten for some time, and appears to be safe most of the time. We also have an obesity and diabetes epidemic, and a sudden spike in allergies and reactions to gluten and such - are you telling me that there’s no way that any of that could be attributed to new foods in our diet that haven’t been eaten for hundreds of years? I’m allergic to bell peppers and most forms of pepper. If a GMO food pulls whatever it is that triggers my allergy out of a pepper and puts it into an ear of corn, it’s possible I could be eating my Wheaties and have a reaction that kills me. It’s also possible they might make peppers I can eat, which would be lovely.
My concerns with GMO foods are not that they’re usually not perfectly safe. It’s that the corporate culture and patent/trade secrets aspects of the system make it hard to tell what’s going on, and 15 years of success isn’t a definitive test. It takes more than 15 years of smoking before cancer starts showing up - who’s to say some particular mutation in a particular GMO food doesn’t have some interaction with a particular segment of the population that causes cancer after a few decades?
If you do not trust the government to verify and enforce the safety of food, how do you trust the government to develop and enforce good naming regulations?
My comment was referring primarily to your claim that any given GMO has a lack of data or is hard to test. That’s not true - they are extensively tested.
The day a researcher actually is able to prove this, there’s a nobel waiting in the wings for it. Meanwhile, there’s currently no reason beyond an incredibly weak correlation to assert that GMO food is attributable to any of those things. Let’s not grasp at straws here. Never mind that “a sudden spike in allergies” may very well be like the “sudden spike” in Autism - that we’re just better at looking for it. Don’t even get me started on Gluten.
And the massive breadth of peer-reviewed research quite definitively says “you’re wrong”.
I don’t know; give me one good reason why we should believe this to be the case.
Substitute “vaccines” for “GMOs” and you have another classic correlation=causation fallacy.
We have already seen rare examples of conventionally bred crops causing unexpected allergies, so it’s not impossible that a GM food allergy might one day appear.
Given the rigorous testing of new GM crops (and lack of such testing in new conventionally hybridized crops), I have more confidence in GM food safety.
This seems like a weirdly incoherent argument to me. of course the methods enacted by the Aztecs were ‘more natural’ - they were hardly removed from processes that happen in nature all by themselves.
Of course it can be argued that ‘more natural’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘better’, but that’s not what you did here.
The Aztecs purposefully put different species of plant next to each other and ate what came out in the end. They were randomly crossbreeding disparate species, without knowing what they were doing. These were not species which randomly came together in the wild.
Hybridisation happens in the wild - if the plants were closely related enough to interbreed when placed next to each other in a garden, then the process is, I think unarguably ‘more natural’ than the laboratory insertion of transgenic material that was sourced from an organism in a different phylum.
Again, ‘more natural’ doesn’t automatically mean ‘good’ - and that, I think, is the argument you’re really addressing, but instead of saying “‘more natural’ does not mean ‘better’”, you argued “It’s not ‘more natural’” - which (if the term ‘natural’ has any meaning at all) is incorrect.
It all comes down what you mean by natural. The Aztecs and other native people in Central and South America did all sorts of experiments on their crops to produce the crop they wanted.
They didn’t understand genetics any more than pigeon breeders did before Mendel’s experiments were first made public in the 20th century. It doesn’t mean they didn’t understand how to produce better plants.
Is non-GMO corn natural, or an affront to nature. If man disappeared from this world, bananas, carrots, broccoli, cabbage heads, and corn will quickly revert back to their inedible wild types. You can make the case that what happened to corn isn’t natural because it took a strong hand of man to make it what it is today.
However, the processes used to make the abhorrent unnatural monstrosity we call corn were pretty much what could occur in nature under the right albeit unlikely circumstances. The tools were pretty simple: pollination, and cross breeding.
The truth is that you can make poisonous, deadly, and bad for the environment plants using non-GMO methods and sell these creations in any organic market. For over a century, plants have been bred using non-GMO methods to be more herbicide resistant and to contain genes never found in their wild cousins.
What direct genetic manipulation allows you to do is to do this type of stuff a lot faster.
Is that bad? Well, both a camp fire and an explosion are simple oxidation events. The sole difference is the speed at which oxidation takes place. I would say that the speed and accuracy of GMO processes could produce more dangerous offspring faster than a non-GMO breeding program. Maybe even faster than regulators could keep such a process under control.
However, I am confident that even Monsanto – although possibly an evil spawn of Satan himself – isn’t breeding a crop of ambulant corn that feasts on the brains of the living.